Spooks and Haints

When very imaginative people grow up next door to an old historical graveyard, it is a given that their house is  haunted. Our house, being spittin' distance from the above graveyard, certainly had all the necessary elements required for a haunting. The gravestone above is that of the first governor of Alabama, William Wyatt Bibb. We always considered his ghost to be of the friendly sort. I mean, who would venture to think that a public servant such as a governor could come back as a mean ghost??? All encounters with Gov. Bibb were of the neighborly sort, but he wasn't the only haint in the hood. It was rumored that our house was built on an ancient indian burial ground (that's my story and I'm stickin' to it.) I've already mentioned some of the strange happenings that occurred in our house, like levitating objects, but that was only the beginning of the spooky stuff...

The governor's family was buried in this graveyard, and some were infants and small children. At times when the night was just dark enough and the wind was blowing just right, we could hear through our open windows the crying of babes in the middle of the night. There were also times when we could hear the sounds of an old-fashioned party going on over in that direction - the tinkling of champagne glasses and the faint sounds of cheerful mingling on the wind. You never knew when you'd hear footsteps in the hallway or voices on the breeze.

Stay tuned for the story of how Bibb's death was reinacted before our eyes one frightfully stormy night...

1960's Tanning Salon and Spa

1. Tanning Salons: A 1960's tanning salon consisted of a back yard, a big sheet out of the linen cabinet, a pair of GINORMOUS sunglasses, a battery operated FM radio with a long antenna, and a mixture of baby oil and iodine (guaranteed to fry white girls to a crisp.) Of course, a water hose nearby was an essential tanning tool, as the Alabama tanner must have some sort of cooling system, especially when covered from head to toe with a concoction that would fry tater tots. Yes, we did get burnt to a crisp, but it turned to a nice tan after the first or second good peeling.

2. Hair Color: To get those beautiful natural highlights in our hair, we would put lemon juice or peroxide in our hair. Yes, if my memory serves me well, it did actually work.

3. Swimming Strategy:  Alabama summers were the devil, and in order to get yourself invited to the neighbor's swimming pool, you had to put your swimsuit on under your clothes and walk up and down the road next to the neighbor's house complaining about how hot it is outside (very loudly and dramatically). The theory was that when the lucky pool owners (the Samsals) realized their neighborhood children were in dire need of refreshing, they would have the deepest, most sincere sympathy for said neighbors and invite them inside the fence to swim. This theory was tested hundreds of times and found to be very ineffective. We did actually get invited to swim on rare occasions at the pools of the Grays, Willifords, and Calloways. As good fortune would have it, Millbrook had a public swimming pool down at the community center. Mama would take us there from time to time and we LOVED it!!!! They would keep the candy bars in the freezer because candy would melt in 10 minutes flat on an Alabama summer day. Our favorite frozen candy bar was a ZERO!!!!!!!! I remember thinking Linda Houston was the coolest girl on the planet, because although she had spina bifida and got around in a wheelchair, she could go to the bottom of the pool and dive for quarters without holding her nose. I couldn't do that until I was about 15...

4. Outdoor fun: When Mama would let us, we had almost as much fun squirting each other with the water hose as we did swimming. However, water hose water isn't free, and Mama would never let us run the water for very long. After a few years, we figured out that if we wanted to cool down on a hot summer day, we could volunteer to wash the car, and we could kill two birds with one stone.

Times were simpler then, when kids were kids, parents ruled the roost, and neighbors were your friends (well, most of them were anyway....).

Holey Toothpaste,Batman!

I just couldn't resist blogging about this one. In chapel yesterday, Mr. Byrd was talking about lessons he's learned over the course of his life. Some lessons were how to use the last bit of bar soap without having to toss it into the trash, and how to keep the sink stopper from breaking. But my personal favorite? -  How to get all the toothpaste out of the tube without wasting it. I had TOTALLY forgotten that when I was a kid, we had aluminum (or some kind of metal) toothpaste tubes.

I don't know how many times my Mama fussed at us for not rolling the tube up from the bottom as we used it. (Very convenient way to get all the toothpaste out.) The only problem with these tubes was that the metal was thin enough to crack open on the sides if you twisted it or handled it too roughly. Sometimes the tube would get a hole in it where you rolled it up. One squeeze and toothpaste went everywhere - Holey Toothpaste, Batman! When that would happen, you just had to keep the lid screwed on and dispense the toothpaste from the hole in the side, and of course, listen to Mama fuss.....

Sunday Dinner

When I was a kid, Sundays meant going to church and eating fried chicken!!!!! We were only a family of six, but Mama had to fry two chickens because we were such pigs. We'd be sitting in church and at about 11:30 my mind would wander to thoughts of the cast iron frying pan just waiting to get busy at our house. Mama would heat up the shortening and fry the chicken up in that good old cast iron skillet over a gas stove. The livers were the first pieces to come out of the frying pan,and they served as the appetizers. We had to sneak one over on Daddy to get to the chicken livers before he did. When we sat down at the table together, we each had our favorite piece of chicken to claim as our own. Daddy and I liked the legs, Mama liked the thighs, Pam liked the back and wings, and I don't remember what Janet liked - I think maybe it was the wings, too. If I remember correctly, Donna Jo preferred the breast. I do remember that she would eat what everybody else had left on their plates! She was our human garbage disposal, and she never gained an ounce. (I won't tell you who was "the bacon snitcher" in the family; I don't want to incriminate myself.)

NOBODY could fry chicken like my Mama!!!!! Our other regular Sunday meal was roast and gravy cooked slow in the oven while we were at church. My Mama's gravy was out of this world! My sister Pam inherited the skills of perfect fried chicken and scrumptious gravy.

A favorite mealtime memory is hearing my Daddy say the blessing. He always said the same blessing, but I believe he always said it sincerely from his heart: "We thank thee, Lord, for this food and all Thy many blessings. In Jesus name, Amen." That was such a sweet prayer, unlike the one my Uncle Wallace used to say to get a rise out of Grandmother:  "God bless the peas....Pass the peas!"

A kid learned manners back then, too. Elbows off the table, napkin in your lap, politely asking the person next to you to pass the salt, never reaching across the table, and absolutely no slurping or burping. Yep, those were the days when Sunday dinners and supper time meant families sitting around the table together, saying the blessing, and enjoying good home cooking while reflecting on the events of the day -- when kids were kids and parents ruled the roost; your neighbors were your friends, and going to church was as natural as eating, sleeping, and breathing. These are my water-colored memories of the way we were...

Diapering 101 for Wimps

DIAPERS FOR WIMPS

All you young folks under the age of 40, I don't want to hear you complain about changing diapers. Let's compare changing diapers today to what it was like when my nephews were born in the 70's. (And, yes, I did an AWFUL lot of diaper changing from the time I was eleven years old!!! Trust me!)

Your Baby Wets:
Nowadays - You know it because the disposable diaper is heavy and squishy.

Back then - You know it because pee is leaking out of your baby's cloth diaper, running down his legs, and soaking your own clothes.

DIAPERS FOR BRAVEHEARTS

Your Baby Poops:
Nowadays - You change him by pulling the disposable diaper off as quickly as possible, wiping his bottom with pre-moistened, nicely scented disposable baby wipes as fast as you can, roll it all up into a nice little stink bomb and toss it into a conveniently airtight diaper genie which locks in  all the noxious fumes. The process takes approximately one minute, in which you can hold your breath, only having to come up for air once. You wash your hands and you're done.

Back then -You change him by gathering the needed equipment while pee and poop are leaking out of the baby's diaper and rubber pants. You will need a pair of nose plugs or a gas mask ('cause this won't be quick), a towel to place under the baby to keep poop off the furniture, a warm washcloth (real terrycloth, not disposable) with which to wipe his little bottom, a pair of huge diaper pins, a clean cloth diaper (folded to fit the size of your baby's hiney), and a clean pair of rubber pants. You put on your protective nose gear, place the baby on a towel, unfasten the clothes pins and put them aside (outside the baby's reach), hold your breath, open the diaper, clean the baby from belly button to toes`with the washcloth that you hope is still warm. Quickly wrangle the little wiggler and wrap him up in his custom-folded clean cloth diaper, run the baby pin through your hair to oil it a little bit (or you'll never get it to pierce the thick cotton diaper), pin that diaper together tightly, pull on the rubber pants, place the baby in his playpen or crib and move on to phase two......

                              The POOPY TORTURE CHAMBER.

This is the part of the process where you take the cloth diaper and the washcloth to the toilet and dip it up and down in the toilet bowl until all the turds are off the fabric and afloat, trying not to gag and sputter as you work.You flush the john, hoping you don't accidentally let the diaper and washcloth go down the hatch, and then make your way to the washing machine for the final steps of sterilizing the diapers for their next use.

Oh, the unexplainable joy of having disposal diapers on the scene before my children came along in the nineties! The massive loads of laundry have been reduced, not to mention the drastic reduction in gags and sputters. Thank you, Lord, for things disposable....We are surely blessed!

Computers are for Namby Pambys

I'm sitting here at my desktop computer while I listen to the sounds of Haley "typing" away at her research paper on my laptop. The little pitter patter of her fingers on the keyboard sounds nothing like typing did during my research paper days. We typed with a real typewriter - you know, the authentic manual kind.

Typewriters back then were evil. You had to be a REAL typist to tame these bad boys. There was no room for mistakes - you had to get it right the first time! None of this namby-pamby backspacing or hitting delete keys!  To reign in the manual monster, you had to first make sure the ribbon was still good (not twisted or used up). This ribbon was made of some kind of thin fabric coated with black ink powder or something. When a ribbon was used up, you had to replace it with a new one, which I don't think I ever really got the hang of. If your ribbon was good, you inserted the paper by placing it behind the roll bar and manually turn the roll bar dial to get the paper lined up where you wanted it. A bar with rubber rollers held the paper down for you (isn't that sweet?). Then the brave typist would set her margins manually with little metal tabs. Mind you, all of these steps were the easy part. Now it was time to start typing...

When you hit a key on a manual monster, little metal bars with raised letters would slam the black-coated ribbon against the paper and leave an imprint of the letter. Groovy, huh? Now, what set an AUTHENTIC typist apart from these modern-day KEYBOARDERS was the problem of correcting errors. You had to be very accurate, or you'd waste a great deal of time trying to cover up your mistakes. We had white-out paper that you could use to correct errors. This was a little rectangle of paper with dried-up white-out on it. You would back space over the letter you typed incorrectly, place the white-out strip between the black ribbon and your paper and strike the incorrect letter again. The letter bars would imprint the white stuff over the bad black stuff and your mistake would disappear (sort of).  Sounds easy enough, doesn't it? Then there was the problem of accidentally striking two letters at a time and getting the metal letter bars stuck together. If that's not enough of a pain, when you came to the end of a line of type, there was no "return" key - you had to reach up and push the carriage bar to the right to manually line the paper back up on its left margin.

I remember our first electric typewriter. We thought Star Trek had come to town! By the time I was in high school, electric typewriters were used. Maybe one day I'll tell you about my typing instructor, Mrs. Ivory. She was unique in her own right. By the time I got my first job, we had genuine, bonified word processors! Boy, had technology come a long way!!!!! My kids would get a kick out of those antiquated old things!

You know, these new fangled computers and printers make "typing" so much easier, but I really miss the distinctive sound of a manual typewriter. It made a wonderfully rhythmic thwack-thwack-thwack-thwack - pop - ziiiiiiinnnnng! And the typewritten page just looked so much more interesting back in the day. The spacing was sometimes imperfect, and the letters weren't always lined up just right. Some letters were darker than others, depending how hard you struck the keys. There was something unique about every typewriter - it gave the writer a "type" of fingerprint, so to speak. Yep, you had to be a real he-man or she-woman to tame one of those manual monsters, but the experience was unforgettable.  I wouldn't mind getting my hands on one of those once again, for old time's sake...Those were the days!